Category Archives: house stuff

The first week of the kids being back in school consisted of me running errands, meeting people for lunch, and just generally skipping and floating through life because, hello, freedom.

Now with the second week here, I’ve settled into a routine of volunteering at the school, working out, actually preparing food ahead of time for my family to eat, and starting on all of the things that have accumulated over the last few months that I haven’t been able to tackle.

One of those was deep cleaning the bathrooms, and I decided that today was the day. The boys had kept up all summer with their weekly cleanings, so it’s not like they’ve gone uncleaned for months, but I knew it was time for me to do it.

Let me just sum it up like this:

1. I didn’t know how bad a housekeeper I really am until today.

2. Toilets have so, so many tiny gross places on them, and I’d really never cleaned one that well, apparently. What prompted this crazy cleaning is my super-sensitive sense of smell, so, you know, gag.

3. I’d like to issue a blanket apology to anyone who has used the bathroom at our house the last, oh, say four years aka the whole time we’ve lived here. Because I guess our bathrooms really haven’t been that clean this whole time.

In the boys’ bathroom I realized that the shower curtain was due for a washing (extremely close proximity to the toilet), and in keeping with my previous low standards, as I rehung it, I asked the boys to please just do their best not to pee on the shower curtain. My comment was met with mostly-blank stares and some nods, like they didn’t have a clue what I was asking them to do. So we’ll see how that goes in the future.

Even though it was gross, I was surprised at how much today wasn’t horrible, even though I cleaned all day long…turns out being uninterrupted, with loud, favorite music playing, makes even the worst jobs tolerable.

A long time ago in a land far away (er, 20 miles away in Maryland Heights), when I was just a child bride (seriously, the older I get, the more I realize just how young we were when we married) setting up a home with my new husband, we used to do the laundry together.

Awww. That’s cute, isn’t it?

Well, we did. We had to cart the baskets a couple of buildings over from ours to use the quarter machines that were always filled with someone else’s left-behind laundry (gag). We’d wash and dry and return to our cozy first-floor apartment to fold.

That’s where the trouble began.

Matt informed me that I was folding the towels wrong.

Ahem. What?

He showed me how he thought the towels should be folded. It became a lighthearted joke between the two of us, and just to be accommodating, I started folding towels his way. Start with the towel flat:

Then you do these folds:

The way I always folded towels was like this:

My way is one less step, and when you unfold it, it’s ready to put on the towel rack without having to refold it. However, his way folds up the towel more compactly, and it fits better on a bathroom shelf.

I just want to stop for a second and comment on how hilarious this is to me now, that he had an opinion about this. Read about his bachelor pad here for a bit of insight.

Anyway, over the years, Matt has helped less with the laundry. He still folds a load here and there, which I very much appreciate, but since I quit working, washing/drying/folding/sorting moved entirely into my jurisdiction, which seems fair. However, I was still folding towels “his” way.

Yesterday, as my hands were full of clean towels and I was trying one-handed to hang clean ones on the towel racks, they ended up like this:

And it occurred to me: why in the world am I still folding towels his way? He rarely folds or puts away a towel; they just magically appear clean on his towel rack!

So now, nearly 15 years into our marriage, I’m taking it back. I can now one-handed put a towel on the rack like this, thanks to my revelation:

This is all kind of sad, but it’s real, and it makes me laugh a little.

Like this:

1. As a follow-up to this post on his coughing issue: it’s asthma. I’m certain. He’s been on a steroid inhaler for 2+ months now, and we’ve broken out the rescue inhaler twice and used it for a maximum of a week each time when he started a little bit of a cough. No daily coughing anymore! It’s such a relief to feel like we at least know what it is. Now, he can’t stay on this steroid inhaler forever, and will likely go off it after allergy season passes. So it will be interesting to see how it all unfolds after that, but at least now we know.

2. His head wound has healed so beautifully I can’t believe it! Just a perfect pink line all through his eyebrow, which is sure to fade with time. It’ll be slathered in sunscreen all summer, but he always is anyway.

3. On Saturday, Bennett had his first practice baseball game, and during warm-ups, somehow took a ricocheted flyball to the lip. Gotta love getting a call from your friend (and coach’s wife) who’s already at the game, alerting you to the fact that you may see B coming back from the concession stand with a bleeding lip and ice pack, but that she’s checked it and it doesn’t need stitches. Sigh.

4. We decided, rather rashly for our family, to convert the guest bedroom into a bedroom for Bennett, which means all 3 boys have separate rooms now! Bennett was all for this, and he will gladly give up his room and bunk with Jack Henry when we have company, which was the deal we made with him upon making the switch.

Of course, he chose Illini as his theme, which is really cool because we had all kinds of stuff to go in there. Take a little look around!

uncle jake…recognize that old poster??

reading corner

inside the closet…my fave ikea storage unit (expedit) with some old illini crates.

view from the door

nightstand…hayley made that frame years ago! cutie-pie little illini bros pic from 2008.

2 old tees stretched over a canvas on the left; a cross-stitch of the chief that matt’s mom made for him in college.

I have to admit, even more than when Luke moved into his own room 2 years ago (very few changes were made to decor), this felt like doing a big kid’s room for the first time. Which made me a tiny bit sad, but it was also really fun that he had ideas and input.

5. As of next Monday, he’ll be 9. NINE. One year from double-digits. Halfway to leaving for college. Birthdays now bring about a sense of urgency in me…there’s still so much I want him to know, and the years to learn those things are just flying by. And when I get reflective about Bennett and who he is and what it’s like to parent him, I get kinda weepy…I don’t know, I just love him so much, and parenting him has been challenging beyond what I envisioned and made me grow and stretch and I’m thankful for that and just hope we’re doing what’s right and good for him (and his brothers, of course) all the time. Does that make any sense?

He’ll spend the weekend leading up to his birthday playing baseball, and his love for the sport combined with his love for his team makes that the perfect way to celebrate.

2nd season of t-ball ( sadly, i have no pics of him playing his first season!)

he’d just turned 4 here.

There will be lots of little celebrations over the coming days that I’ll be sure to document!

Like this:

Seriously. Just when I get excited that one area of my life/house is totally under control, I realize that two (or eight, whatever) are totally NOT under control.

**Sneak: I have a fun organizing surprise coming your way in a couple of weeks! Stay tuned.**

I’m lucky enough to have have 3 freezers: the one in the kitchen (it’s a side-by-side, horrible in terms of storage, makes me curse at it regularly), our extra bottom fridge/top freezer in the basement that we brought here from our old house (when you buy 6 gallons of milk at a time, you need an extra fridge), and our half-size deep freeze, a floor model purchased years ago, and still an awesome investment.

I buy lots of stuff in bulk: shredded cheese, chicken, ground beef, bacon, bread. Plus more stuff. Plus all of the applesauce Heather and I make annually. So we use a lot of this space.

However, I often don’t know what I have in the freezers. On the first of the year, prompted by what I don’t know, I cleaned them all out.

And then, I made a list of what’s in them, and stuck the list to the side with a cute magnet.

For example, I had 4 bags of leftover turkey breast from Thanksgiving. So I wrote: Turkey Breast 4 3 2 1. Then, I just cross out the 4 when I grab a bag of it to use, so that I know there are 3 left.

this was taken a while ago, so more has already been used! it’s one of those things that makes me wonder why i didn’t ever do this before now.

It is SO NICE when I menu plan to look at the list and build meals from there. It’s also really nice when I don’t menu plan, and can look at the list and find something quick.

i blame this mostly on the kids. they come in here and take random stuff out and then don’t put it back the right way. hmm, i think i just realized who’s going to be cleaning this area up.

stuff from the last picture regularly finds its way out here to this fort/tent city area that the boys are constantly building and rebuilding. honestly, i don’t even care anymore that this part of the house is a disaster. until we have company over.

Sigh.

Back to another success. Now that the boys are wearing close to the same size in many of their clothes, keeping them straight is difficult. Particularly boxers and t-shirts, but also things that have just been handed down (and therefore I can’t remember where it’s supposed to go now). The conversation usually goes like this:

Me: Luke, those pants are way too short. This is your last day wearing them.

It’s annoying. And things end up in drawers where they don’t belong, thus they don’t get worn. Putting initials on the tags won’t work unless I want to cross things out. So, I came up with another plan.

Dots. 1 dot for Luke. 2 for Bennett. 3 for Jack Henry.

this cardinals shirt is jack henry’s…probably passed down since luke, since it’a molina one.

It’s fail-proof. And, everyone in the family understands the simplicity of the system, so everyone can help sort clean, folded laundry.

It only took me forever to figure this out, but there are still lots of years with all 3 boys in this house and the opportunity to accidentally switch up their clothes, so better late than never, right?

What’s working for you? Or commiserate with me on the areas I’ve let go. Please share!

Truly, the result is amazing and I am beyond glad that we didn’t just buy the hardware needed to reattach the old shelving. Having your closet throw up on the night of December 23 isn’t pleasant, and living with all of your clothing on the floor of several rooms isn’t pleasant either. However, if that hadn’t happened, we likely would’ve spent the next several years cursing the horrible layout of our closet, wishing the space was better utilized than it is.

We spent some time pricing different units online and in a couple of stores, and decided to do it ourselves using the allen+roth closet system from Lowe’s…it’s not nearly as awesome as The Container Store, but at less than 1/3 of the price, it was what we wanted to do. It mostly went according to plan, minus a couple of hiccups with installation, and my wish that the shelving that came with the units was longer so that we could use them above the hanging clothes (I’m still formulating a plan for that).

So here it is! For an organizing freak like me, putting everything back was fun and slightly overwhelming, because there were so many possibilities, starting over like we were. But I love how it’s all come together. The only thing left to do is figure out where to hang my belts, and I’m done!

view from our bathroom

matt’s side, obviously. he would like to point out that approximately 40% of the closet is actually his.

he’s so organized. even more than me with the color coordination and all.

and my side. matt doesn’t understand my organizational strategy, thinking that color is the only way…but no. tanks, then tees, then long-sleeves.

the next thing to go. a closet this pretty needs a real light fixture, not a bulb in the ceiling that looks like something out of a horror movie.

Oh…and for the record: today is snow day #4 in a row, following 16 days of Christmas break. Sanity intact, but barely, as the boys play yet another game of whatever it is they play downstairs that involves a ball hitting a lot of stuff and a lot of yelling. Clearly, I am very concerned.

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I ran a quick errand to the mall this evening. Honestly, the awkwardness I witnessed at Aerie made me look around for a camera, and could be the focus of a blog post all by itself.

As it stands, in light of what happened after that, the story about how I saw a young 20-something-year-old man bra shopping for his girlfriend (who was not present) WITH HIS GRANDMOTHER will have to suffice as the opener. Seriously. People are so.weird.

As I was walking out of the mall, I got a text from Matt. It was a picture of our closet, with all of the belongings from the long side of the closet on the floor, and the brackets dangling from the wall.

So yes. While my children slept, and my husband minded his own business, our 22-year-old shelf in our closet decided it had had enough, and dumped all of my clothes and the few remaining Christmas gifts stored up high to the floor.

this is a first world problem. fully aware. still a major pain in the butt.

previously, this bracket was the opposite direction. this is not very helpful for holding up a shelf.

I’ll cop to having said a pretty bad word in my head when I looked at the picture a second time, and realized that the kids’ one and only Santa gift had just tumbled to the floor.

Sidenote: this is the last year for Santa in our house, and he’s going out big: the kids are getting an iPad! They have NO idea. It will be such a fun surprise. If it works after the 7-foot drop it took, of course. (I did open the packaging…the screen did not shatter.)

The following is Matt’s and my text convo before I got home:

The wine was waiting when I walked in.

And then Matt said the words I hoped he’d say: “Let’s just redo the closet.”

HOORAY!

The timing is horrible, but it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s ok-sized for a walk-in, but so poorly configured that the space is not nearly maximized. From the moment we laid eyes on this house, we’ve wanted it changed, but just haven’t wanted to spend the money on it.

With the brackets all busted and my belongings scattered about on the floor, this seems like as good a time as any.

So…have any of you used a custom closet company? Would you recommend them? We are not handy people, so installing this ourselves is likely out of the question, but I’ve already found a couple of online design tools that I’ll at least give a try. Fill me in on your experience!

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Confession time. And I’ve maybe mentioned this before. But I’m not the best at keeping a really clean house. Picked up? Mostly. But clean? Meh. I’d give myself a C. With the boys going back to school, I considered making myself a cleaning schedule for about one hot second, and then gave up that idea, because I would fail at that within a week.

[I don’t do well with rigid schedules. So the idea that every Monday, I’d need to clean bathrooms, and every Tuesday, mop the floor, etc., makes me shiver.]

Sooo, it should come as no surprise, knowing the above, that I don’t clean the boys’ shower very often. And by “not very often” I mean I can probably count on one hand how many times I clean it in a year. I know some of you are gagging, and that’s understandable. I think I’d care more if:

a) anyone took a bath in there
b) I ever saw the tub (the boys have gotten really good at closing the shower curtain after showering, so I never even see it)
c) they complained about how gross it was. But let’s be honest here – it’s highly likely they’re peeing in there. In the place where they clean* themselves. Like they’re ever going to complain about how dirty their shower is.

And I KNOW I’d care more if I was showering in there.

When I happened to take a peek in there this morning, I was a bit disgusted by what I saw. Lots of pink mildew and a TON of soap scum (which, seriously, it’s a white shower. If you can SEE soap scum, it’s bad), but surprisingly, not a horrible mildew odor. I knew it was time to do something about this, because I was pretty sure I hadn’t cleaned it all summer. 3 boys x an average of 6 showers/week/boy x 12 weeks of summer = approximately 250 showers worth of nastiness in there.

Ahem.

I usually use a bottle of some kind of commercial cleaner, but this time I grabbed my bottle of Pinterest-inspired heavy-duty spray that I’ve used on my own shower in the past. I love that it’s cheap, green, and works like magic.

So after a little hard work** (see details below if you, too, have procrastinated shower-cleaning to the point of the authorities needing to be called), the tub, shower and tub mat are SPARKLING, and that is not an exaggeration.

See?

I realize without a before picture, this means almost nothing, but trust me, it was gross, and now it’s not.

Which seems like about enough for one day, to quote my friend Suzanne. 🙂

*this term should be applied very loosely here, I’m certain.

**Here’s the how-to on this shower cleaner:
It’s simply one part white vinegar to one part blue Dawn dish soap (actually, err on the side of more vinegar than Dawn by a little bit). That’s it. Pour them in the spray bottle, shake it up, and spray it on.

3 things:

1. It smells bad. Not just like vinegar, because I use that all the time for things, but there is something about the combination of the 2 that makes for a nasty strong smell.

2. Plan to spray this on the shower, let it sit for an hour or so, and then come back and scrub it with a big scrubbing brush. It works best if you run some warm water in the tub, so that when you’re scrubbing you can dip the brush in there and suds up the solution on the walls.

3. It takes some scrubbing to get it off, so plan on it being a bit of work. However, your shower will literally be sparkling clean. And then you don’t have to worry about it for like another 3 months, right?